Health News: Nuts Make You Live Longer, Booze Doesn't Make You Fat

RUSH: There's new health research out, ladies and gentlemen. It's from the UK Daily Mail. And quite simply, it is alcohol does not make you fat. Drinking does not make you fat. Doesn't matter the calories, it does not make you fat. In fact, it may, in the right quantities, facilitate weight loss. I'm not making it up. And there's a companion story. "Help yourself to some nuts this holiday season: Regular nut eaters were less likely to die of cancer or heart disease -- in fact, were less likely to die of any cause -- during a 30-year Harvard study."

Okay, a couple of wives' tales. Everybody believes that drinking beer, wine, adult beverages just packs on the pounds because of all the calories. Turns out not to be true. A lot of people say, "Don't eat those nuts, peanuts, cashews, stay away from it, all the fat in there, horrible." Apparently, in a 30-year Harvard study, nobody died who was eating nuts.

"Drinking Does Not Make You Fat -- It sounds too good to be true. But on Saturday the Mail carried extracts from an extraordinary new book by science writer Tony Edwards, drawing on a wealth of medical evidence, that says alcohol is good for your health. Today, in part two of our serialization, the former BBC TV science producer ... dispels the myth that drinking makes you fat."

No, no. I know what's happening now. There's a lot of you out there, "Come on, Rush, don't fall for this. This is bunk." This is my point. Look at all of the health old wives' tales that everybody's believed all these years because somebody said so in the media. And then eventually look at how many of them get knocked down and go by the wayside. I mean, the end result of all this is to pay no attention to it. Live your life. You only get one life and it was not meant to be spent in total denial. And contrary to popular belief, it was not meant to be spent in total suffering, particularly the self-induced kind of suffering. A lot of people think that there's valor in that and so forth. Some people may think there are religious connotations to suffering. I'm not gonna argue about that. But you take the religion component out of it, there's no valor in suffering.

I'm just amazed. We only get one life, and the number of people -- it's overwhelming, actually. I mean, it's a number that swamps. The majority of people who spend most of their lives in denial or in suffering or not in denial but denying themselves things because somehow that's gonna prolong their life but they're miserable at the same time. I mean, the answer to all this stuff is just live your life. And use your own instincts. You are capable of doing what's best for you, contrary to what the government says or the Democrat Party. You are totally capable of taking care of yourself, most of you. You're totally capable of making the right decisions.

Everybody screws up now and then, but there's nobody out there who cares more about you and your future than you do, contrary to what many people think. So the answer to this is not to get into an argument over which scientist is right or which medical piece of information is right. The thing to understand is that there's all kinds of leftists and busybodies and do-gooders that want to control you for whatever reason. There's all kind of people who think that everything they do is exactly right, and everybody else should do it, and they spend all of their lives trying to get everybody to do what they do, including the way they speak, the way they behave. It's gotten out of hand, this political correctness has just gotten out of hand. But here are the details anyway.

"Anyone who’s ever gone on a diet is told to lay off the booze because it’s high in calories. And that, of course, must make it very fattening indeed. Go onto the NHS Direct website --" this is the UK, theirs works, by the way. Their health website works. "-- and you’ll be told a glass of wine contains as many calories as a slice of cake. Or if you prefer beer, the British Nutrition Foundation reminds you two pints are roughly the equivalent in calories to a full glass of single cream.

"So you may be surprised to learn that there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever to support the idea that alcohol makes you put on weight. That’s hugely counter-intuitive, I know, because alcohol certainly is said to contain lots of calories. But the curious fact remains that alcohol isn’t fattening. Here’s just some of the evidence. Professor Charles S. Lieber of Harvard University, who died in 2009, was probably the greatest expert on alcohol and health the world has ever seen.

"In the Seventies, he founded the first scientific journal on alcohol, and was also the first to establish a link between alcohol and liver disease. So he was no friend of alcohol. Yet in 1991 he firmly rejected the notion that alcohol has any significant effect on weight. Lieber, however, was relying mainly on evidence drawn from studies that were looking at alcohol’s other effects. It wasn’t until later that anyone actually decided to examine this conundrum directly. In the Nineties, researchers at Harvard embarked on a survey of almost 20,000 middle-aged women, whose drinking habits and weight were tracked for almost 13 years.

"At the start, the women were all roughly UK dress sizes 8 to 12. By the end, about 9,000 had put on significant amounts of weight, and some had become clinically obese. All other things being equal, you’d expect the fatties to be the drinkers. But they weren’t. In fact, the fatties were the women who didn’t drink, and the skinnies were the heaviest drinkers."

In the Harvard study of thousands of women, 20,000 middle-aged women over 13 years, "The women who drank five grams of alcohol a day reduced their risk of being overweight by 4 per cent. Those who drank 15 grams (roughly one medium glass of wine) a day reduced their risk of piling on the pounds by 14 per cent. ... The researchers made full allowances for obvious lifestyle differences that might have skewed the results, such as exercise, food intake and smoking habits. Indeed, if the study had been a 13-year trial of a new slimming pill," which turned out to have no effect whatsoever.

Now, I guess you could say the scientific reason that alcohol is blamed on weight gain is insulin, 'cause insulin is one of the primary ingredients to weight gain. This is the theory. That's why any diet that triggers the smallest release of insulin is best. The more insulin, the more tendency to pack on pounds. And because alcohol gets metabolized as sugar, it is said to trigger massive amounts of insulin in the body to metabolize it, and thereby is fattening. That all of that turns out to be in the scientific research at Harvard untrue. (interruption) No. It's that massive amount of insulin are not triggered and it doesn't prolong, it doesn't hang around for a long time. So 20,000 women over 13 years.

Now, folks, don't misunderstand. After reading this, I don't know what to believe. I wouldn't know what to tell you is the truth. That's not my point. My point is you can find wherever you go whatever you want to hear in terms of diet, exercise, and food to back up what you already believe. My point is much larger. Ignore it. You will learn what causes you to gain weight and what doesn't. You will learn what makes you feel better and what makes you feel worse. You will learn by virtue of experimenting what's good for you and what isn't good for you, and it may differ from other people. There are no monolithic standards. We're all different and everybody's metabolisms are different.

My only point is, just live your life and try to enjoy it as much as you can. There's already enough pressure on everybody out there that makes it arduous. There's already enough suffering that you can experience that is not self-inflicted without you adding any more to it. And to go through your life denying yourself a piece of cake or an adult beverage because it's gonna kill you 50 years down the line, to me seems irrational, or because you read it at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. That's why this trans fat stuff is just so much bunk. Bloomberg doesn't know what he's talking about. Nobody else does, either. Thirty-two ounce soft drinks, if you want one, have one. It's none of his business.

Not everybody that smokes cigarettes gets lung cancer. Not everybody that smokes cigarettes dies from it. There are a lot of people that get lung cancer that never touch a cigarette. We're all different. Don't be a sheep, and don't let these people who want to totally control and manipulate everything you do have that kind of control. It'll free you up on any number of other things in your life as well. I don't have any idea whether these guys are right about this or not. In fact, to be honest, my experience with alcohol is that it is fattening. My experience with it is that when I stop drinking it, I don't lose weight. I don't know. I don't consume that much adult beverage anyway. Probably not enough to be a factor.

Snerdley is shouting. His experience is if he looks at food he gains weight. Well, I can relate to that, too. Look, I so much believe in the fact that we're all individuals, and I just cringe, I really do. (interruption) Got to cause what? Gaining weight? Of course there are causes. But that's another thing. Look at the number of people that are just obsessed with that. I think if you're obsessed with anything you're defeated. If you're obsessed with not gaining weight, what are you gonna do? If you're obsessed with losing weight, what are you gonna do? Whatever you do you're gonna end up being miserable at the same time. I don't know. This all has political ties to me. I look at how easily people are made to follow and made to believe things and lied to and act like sheep, how easy political correctness is forced on people.